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Happy Birthday Macintosh!

Today is the Apple Macintosh’s 25th birthday. Time flies doesn’t it? I owe a lot in life to this little machine.

I first met the Macintosh in March of 1984. I was a Junior at Texas Tech University, studying Graphic & Package Design under Frank Cheatham. My Production class went to a computer store to have a look at one and get a demonstration. I can distinctly remember being impressed with the graphic capabilities of the machine and the quantum leap in the user interface from all other computer systems I’d seen before. My good friend and previous roommate was a Computer Science major, who built systems in our dorm room, so I was very familiar with computers, though not much of a user then. My other strong memory from that day was turning to a classmate and saying:

“When this thing gets “real” fonts, it will take off.”

I was referring of course to the early bitmapped “city name” (Monaco, Chicago, Geneva, etc) fonts that shipped with the Macintosh. “Real” fonts are just that, real. Typography that has been created and refined by masters over hundreds of years. Back when I went to school we had to learn to render typefaces by hand and I could write freehand in Garamond, Baskerville, Franklin, Helvetica, Century Schoolbook, and many other traditional fonts. Being able to just bang out a perfect typeface on a screen was a dream of every designer back then.

Well, either I was perceptive, or prophetic because not long after my graduation and entrance into the professional world Aldus shipped PageMaker, Adobe shipped PostScript and broke open the world of “real” fonts … on the Macintosh. I was present at the birth of “desktop publishing” as I was a young designer working in Seattle at the time, and all the “old guys” (as I called people my age back then) were terrified of computers and expected us kids to do all the technological heavy lifting. I learned everything I could about computers, software, networks, etc. Within a few years I was managing systems instead of designing things. By 1991 I was no longer a Graphic Designer, I was an IT guy. My design education has served me well however as the entire purpose of design, at least how it was taught to me, was the communication of complex concepts in visual/verbal form. Frank Cheatham insisted that we had to be able to EXPLAIN why we made the design choices we did. They had to make sense, otherwise, as he often said, “it was just decoration.” From that education I learned how to explain complex technology to non-technical people. I have also been able to explain non-technical things to technical people. (I’m a English-Geek translator.) This has allowed me to very successfully manage a class of people that many believe are unmanageable, “IT guys”.

I did my last professional graphic design job in 1994, designing the corporate identity of the company started by a friend of mine… a network geek I met “online” several years before on a Mac-focussed BBS. He was running the network at a local college, while I was running one at a department store‘s in-house Advertising agency. The company he started? digital.forest. That’s right, the company I joined six years later. Before that though my career took me to a publishing company headquartered in London. Along the way I learned UNIX (to manage Sun Sparcservers that ran The Bon’s OPI system), learned multi-protocol networking, people management, budget management, project management, etc. At The Bon I was telling “old white guys in ties” about this new thing called the Internet. I built my first DNS & web servers in 1995. Launched a web company of my own in 1998, and sold it in 2000.

If it were not for this little machine with a 9″ screen I’d still be drawing typefaces while designing things on paper. In a lot of ways I owe my whole professional career and adult life to this little computer from Cupertino. It changed my world. Changed my profession. Changed my career. Changed my life in some very profound ways. It even introduced me to most of my friends. It has been a very interesting 25 years. Happy Birthday Macintosh. I’ll drink a toast to you tonight.

4 thoughts on “Happy Birthday Macintosh!”

you were ahead of me Chuck… I first used a Mac Plus in October ’86 when I moved off shift work and into a facilities development section implementing new equipment and facilities for the weather watchers I still work for today.

The Mac’s were brought into the company by our Research and Development Director… if it wasn’t for him and the enthusiasm of a few within the company they would not have gotten traction. A bit later our new marketing section imported SE30’s and had an early Apple LaserWriter… I ended up with a SE20 at home and a cast off LaserWriter eventually and my household never looked at a PC again!

At work my use of them has continued until now as my last work Mac is all but dead and I am now starting to use a PC… after more than 22 years – it is so hideous it really takes the fun out of the day… but the latest bosses can only see PC’s in the company so I have no choice… shortsighted is all I can say…

About 5 years ago I came across a working Mac Plus and bought it for my museum piece… has the original box as well as the original carrybag…

So like you the Mac has been an important part of my work and home life…. and I’d never be without one today

Windows isn’t THAT bad, it just isn’t as good. For me the layers of annoyances in Windows exceeds my patience (and I’m an exceedingly patient guy!) so unless I were in a situation where it was dictated, I’d choose to avoid it.

Ironically both platforms went through a radical change in the late 90s, and are nothing like their 80s roots. Today’s MacOS is really nothing like the Mac of old. Other than some UI elements, the old MacOS is dead. MacOS X is really NeXTSTEP version 5 or 6, with some Mac-ness grafted on. I had the pleasure of managing some NeXT systems back in the day and still own a pair of “slabs” (one of which even ran this website back in the day!) so the transition for me was rather easy. Apple pulled of the radical change way better than Microsoft did, but then again they had a small fraction of the customers to satisfy along the way, so it was easier.

I’ve managed Windows, Windows NT and up, OS/2, A/UX, FreeBSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, Linux, and several other even more obscure UNIX variants in my day. For a personal computer though I have to say that MacOS X is likely the best UNIX out there today. Not so for servers though, as like Windows it is encumbered by too much “stuff” to be really tunable in a sever environment.

I got my start on an Apple Lisa, and used Macs pretty faithfully until about 1997, but have never gone back. Back in the day huge hardware costs plus fairly quick obsolescence finally just killed the Mac experience for me. I suspect it’s better now, but I still work on windows boxes, not because I love them but because they’re relatively cheap.

Besides, 90% of the audience for the work I do uses Windows machines, so it seems like I should be in the same environment.